Each semester, Academic Support Services and Library staff host workshops for students on general study skills, research skills, quantitative skills, and senior thesis-writing. In an effort to make it easier for students to find out about upcoming workshops, the DoJo and the Library have created a combined workshop list.

This is the first in our occasion series featuring a member of the Data@Reed Team. We start with out newest member, Helen Scharber, Quantitative Skills and Academic Support Coordinator.

What is your role at Reed?
I’m the Quantitative Skills and Academic Support Coordinator at Reed. The Quantitative Skills part means that I run workshops and provide coaching sessions on math skills and study strategies. That’s my favorite part of the job! The Academic Support Coordinator part means I do useful administrative things to support tutoring and other academic support activities.

How do you support data at Reed?
Successful data analysis often relies on having good fundamental math or quantitative reasoning skills. I work with students on those skills in coaching sessions, and we often discuss other things that can indirectly support their work, like study strategies and time management.

What is the hardest thing about working with data?
I find cleaning and preparing data to be the hardest part of working with data. It’s so satisfying, once your data is in shape, to do the analyses and see whether your hypotheses are supported or not. But it seems like, for every hour of the fun part, there are 20 hours of getting the data in order.

Favorite data visualization?
I love the Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music visualization that Edward Tufte reprinted in his Visual Explanations book. The image was created in 1975, and I think helps stretch our idea of what “data” are while also reminding us that good design is just as important as fancy technology. (Although fancy technology is really nice!)

Favorite data resource?
Honestly, my favorite data resource is the collective knowledge and generosity of everyone who has asked or answered a question related to R, Stata, MySQL or Excel on an online forum. None of my projects using data could have gotten done without their help.

Dealing with Data

Senior Thesis WorkshopThursday October 26 12-1 pm

Join faculty, including Associate Professor of Biology Kara Cerveny, for a conversation about key data moments in the thesis-writing process. The workshop will be useful for students early in the thesis process, focusing on what Cerveny calls “predata-ing.”

David Gruber, Assistant Dean of Students for Academic Support, describes predata-ing as:

Helping students think early about how the data they collect, and the questions they ask about their data, contributes to their thesis project. It can be helpful to hear about how other students are approaching data collection and use, and the workshop gives students a chance to learn from each other.

The workshop will also include staff from the Data@Reed team who can provide assistance with finding, managing, analyzing, visualizing, and preserving data.

It’s probably time to start writing your papers. New to using EndNote or Zotero? Need a refresher on how to create a bibliography or cite while you write? We can help. Join us for one of our 30 minute drop-in workshops.

Zotero and EndNote are two citation management software packages available to Reed students. Citation managers allow you to create your own personal research database to easily collect, organize , and format references. Learning to use a citation manager will help you save time when creating bibliographies.

The goal of the week is to increase visibility for at-risk public datasets – either from deletion, repression, or loss.

The website for Endangered Data Week has some background information as to why this issue is coming to prominence now:

Political events in the United States have shed new light on the fragility of publicly administered data. In just the first few weeks of the Trump administration and 115th Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency was allegedly ordered to remove climate change information from its website, the USDA removed animal welfare data from its website, and the House passed H.Res.5, specifically excluding changes to the Affordable Care Act from mandatory long-term cost data analysis. The Senate and House of Representatives have both received proposed bills (S.103 and H.R.482) prohibiting funding from being used “to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.” While researchers, archivists, librarians, and watchdog groups work hard to create and preserve open data, there’s little guarantee that information under federal control will always survive changes to federal agencies.

Endangered Data Week is building on two other noteworthy data rescue programs that have sprung up in the last few months: Data Refuge (focusing on climate data) and ICPSR’s DataLumos (focusing on social science data).